Imagination

I grew up listening to radio. When I was little boy in the 60s I listened to a little battery powered transistor radio for hours and knew all the words to all the popular folksongs that made the early 60s so damn annoying.

Then as a teen in the 70s I discovered real old time radio. There was a station in Cleveland that would play the old radio classics from the 30s and 40s for one hour each week. I waited all week for those show on Sunday night. I would get good and stoned and put on headphones in order to not disturb anyone and loose myself in stories from a different time.

Listening to radio drama takes imagination. I think we are lacking in imagination, with excellent movie special effects and music videos predigesting our ideas for us so we don’t have to use our brain for anything more complicated that trying to decide which useless thing to buy next.

Lately, I have been listening to Radio Classics on satellite radio. I listen for about 3 hours a week and still am amazed at how much I enjoy the cheesy dialog and the transparent plots. One of the things that I hear now that I don’t remember ever hearing before are the commercials.

Smoking was REALLY big back then, when even doctors would recommend their favorite brand of cancer stick. Oil companies that no longer exist were sponsors of very popular shows, and automobiles were becoming fashionable and stylish at the same time, creating a trend that we are still trying to recover from.

Today commercials are still selling the same old concepts started in the 30s like “New and Improved” and “Buy our stuff for just one week” and “Keeps a cleaner engine”.

A lot of the old radio personalities went on to become movie and television stars. A lot of radio shows went on to TV, like “Twilight Zone”, and “Gunsmoke”.

The heyday of radio was the formative years of modern entertainment, like a child growing into a teen or a dog learning what it means to bark, teaching those that would entertain us just what we want and how to get rich giving it to us.

Those were the days.